This story is set in Australia ... a country where prostitution is legal, people drive on the left and only cops and bad guys carry guns. I once carried a gun and now that I don't I feel safer than when I did.
This story is a work of fiction, the people don't exist although there are some small touches of reality. For example The Golden Apple certainly did exist and I was assured by the owner one night many years ago that the pizza story, minus a few of my embellishments, really did happen.
And sometimes there might be ghosts of my past briefly shimmering in parts of the story.
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I knew I was in trouble the moment I saw the two cars pull up outside my house. When your daughters arrive in convoy you just know that you're in for some serious ear-bashing ... and all you can do is try and weather the verbal storm.
I even had some idea of what the topic of conversation was going to be. Both of them had been hassling me for weeks and now they had joined forces and were about to unleash a combined assault on me because ... they were worried about me.
"Dad your social life is worse than mine." My younger daughter was polite. My older daughter wasn't so polite.
"Dad you need to get laid." Yeah, my older daughter was a plain speaker
Yes, my daughters were concerned about me and probably with good cause. I was 46, with three grown-up kids who had all left home.
I had been happily married until three years before when Wendy, my wife, had suddenly announced that she didn't want to be married anymore and had taken off with a wealthy plastic surgeon ... perhaps because she had seen her future in her mother's haggard face?
That had hit me like a ton of bricks and I lost interest in a lot of things ... like work. As a team leader in a very specialised and clandestine section that didn't exist within the Australian Federal Police I needed to be self-motivated and be able to lead and even inspire the people working under me. But for months after she left I struggled to even get out of bed.
It wasn't just her leaving that had robbed me of my motivation, my job was high-stress too and violent confrontations with armed criminals, terrorists and even mercenaries was far more common than most people would have believed.
In fact most of our work was done under a complete cloak of secrecy and even our own husbands and wives didn't know what we did. We faced danger almost every day and, when we were working in a team, everyone in the team relied on every other member of the team.
The stress of working in that environment was finally catching up with me too ... and that was bad for the team.
One team member who was not totally switched on could endanger the lives of every other team member so everyone in the unit needed to be on the top of their game and, when I wasn't, I was a potentially expensive liability.
In the end the unit's Chief Superintendent sat down with me to have a chat. While he was friendly and understanding the bottom line was that the unit was carrying me and things had to change or I would be moved out of the unit permanently.
Like any good leader, he had a simple plan with two options including one that might help me get back on my feet. I had a lot of paid leave in the bank and his suggestion was that I should take some of that and, when I felt that I was ready to come back.
